IMDb Contributors Blog

We’re about to make a behind-the-scenes change to the way we store titles which, to be honest, most users won’t notice but which will affect some submitters.

For years we’ve followed the standard practice of moving articles (the, a, an, etc) to the end of titles when we store them in the database. So, for instance, The Godfather (1972) has been stored as Godfather, The (1972) since… well, since forever. We even used to display it like that, although astute users will have spotted that we now swap the articles back into place for display (but only for titles in English). The advantage of all this article swapping is that it makes it easier to sort titles alphabetically but the disadvantages, especially when dealing with non-English titles, are many and varied.

The time has come, we’ve decided, to bite the bullet and store titles as written.

Little will change on the site because we display English language titles “naturally” anyway but it will make a difference in some places:

• submissions - if you refer to a title in a submission (including submitting a new title) you will now need to enter it in its “natural” form rather than swapping the article. For the majority of submitters this should be more intuitive and more straightforward.
• display - Non-English titles will display properly, so that, for instance, Buono, il brutto, il cattivo., Il (1966) will become  Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. (1966) and Boot – The Making of, Das (1981) will be stored and displayed as Das Boot – The Making of (1981) just as nature intended.
• “browse” pages – we don’t sort titles alphabetically in many places, but where we do (the various Browse pages or MyMovies, for instance) The Godfather (1972) will now be sorted under T and Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo. (1966) under I.
• ftp files – if you download our list files from the ftp server you need to be aware that the sort order of the titles will change in case this affects the way you use them.

The change will affect around 10% of the 1.3 million titles in the database and we’re hoping to make the swap during the day on Tuesday 7 April so that they’ll be visible on the site when the new version is published on Wednesday 8 April.

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